Michael Robotham - The Wreckage

“I gave him the name of a bar in Kensington High Street and told him that I’d try to meet him there by ten. I couldn’t make any promises. We were doing a special report on the last US combat troops being pulled out of Iraq.”

“Did you go to the bar?”

Gooding shakes his head. “I didn’t get away from the office until midnight. I had no way of contacting him. I figured he’d call me back. I didn’t think… you know. I phoned his office the following Monday, but he hadn’t shown up. Then his wife reported him missing.”

Gooding falls silent, glancing at Luca from the corner of his eye. Each time he blinks his eyelashes rest for an instant on his cheeks.

“Did you call the police?” asks Luca.

“What would I tell them?”

“What about his wife?”

“I left a message on her answering machine. She’s the daughter of the former chairman, Alistair Bach. Nobody can get close to her.”

“You didn’t want to get involved?”

“That’s unfair.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

Luca tries to think it through. Richard North’s job was to investigate suspicious transactions and approve new accounts at Mersey Fidelity. If the bank was involved in laundering illegal funds, he should have known about it.

“We need someone at the bank who’ll talk.”

“Good luck with that.”

“North must have had a secretary.”

“Why would she speak to us?”

“Her boss is missing. His car has just been found. She’ll be worried or scared or angry. It can go a lot of different ways.”

“I’ll get you a name and address.”

The only access to this stretch of the river is via a strip of waste ground behind a row of factories that are crumbling from neglect. The padlocked gates have been opened and two police cars block the entrance.

“Jesus wept,” says Campbell Smith as TV cameras and photographers surround his car. Questions are shouted through the closed windows. Bodies are jostled aside. Bleached of color by the bright lights, Campbell’s face looks like a white balloon bobbing on his shoulders, ready to drift loose and float into the night.

“Who leaked this?” he barks. “I want to know. And get someone down here from the media unit.”

White spots float behind Ruiz’s closed lids as he shields his face from the flashguns. The car pulls up next to an old railway line, the silver ribbons disappearing into the darkness.

Above the factories and warehouses, the Olympic stadium is a white exoskeleton rising in concentric circles like a giant spaceship descending from the night sky. The River Lea ripples in the breeze, black as ink in the shadows. Spotlights have been set up on gantries and a portable generator provides a droning soundtrack. The only other noise comes from a news chopper flying above them, aiming a spotlight on to a floating dredger moored in the center of the river.

“I want them out of here!” bellows Campbell. “This is a fucking crime scene, not a reality show.”

A security guard is waiting on the edge of the light. Dressed in heavy boots, Levi’s and a company shirt, he stands with his legs spread like a man who enjoys being the center of attention. A tattooed serpent curls along his forearm and around his wrist.

“Dredger came through today,” he tells Campbell. “I thought the car was going to be an old wreck, until they lifted it out of the water. Looks like a brand-new Beemer. Fucked now.

“You can see the tire tracks across the way,” he motions to the far bank. “The fence is down. Tree fell on it. Council never bothered sending out a work crew.”

“Jesus, what’s that smell?” asks Campbell, wadding his handkerchief and holding it over his nose.

“The Deepham Sewage Works is north of here,” says the security guard. “Pumps out a quarter of a million cubic meters of treated sewage every day.”

“Is that why they’re dredging?” asks Ruiz.

“That’s the theory. This whole area is being done up for the Olympics. Dredging the river, re-vegetation, new towpaths… They don’t want any of them IOC dignitaries coming here and having to smell London’s shit.”

Two police divers are standing on the deck of the dredger, peering into the water. Neither looks keen to get wet. They’ll wait till morning when the sediment has settled.

Gerard Noonan is already at work lifting aluminum boxes from the van. “Whatever happened to Sunday being a day of rest?” he says.

“I didn’t take you for a religious man,” says Ruiz.

“Oh, yeah, I do my praying on my sofa watching Match of the Day.”

“Who are you praying for?”

“Birmingham City.”

“And you still think there’s a God?”

The BMW is on the towpath. The roof crushed. Mud on the wheels and bumpers, a fine layer of silt covering the bodywork. Ruiz follows Noonan. Leaning through an open car door, he notices the keys in the ignition and the automatic shift in drive. The windows were left open so that it would sink more quickly.

Something moves near his knee. He leaps backwards and lets out an expletive. Noonan reaches into the car and pulls out an eel that twists and squirms in his hands, black as sump oil.

“Didn’t you ever catch eels as a kid?”

“When I was a kid they came in jelly with mashed potato.”

The eel splashes into the river, leaving no trace on the surface.

Campbell has finished talking to the security guard. “What have you got?” he asks Noonan.

“Traces of blood in the boot-enough to be worried.”

Ruiz walks along the tracks until he reaches an overhead bridge. Crossing the river, he follows a cyclone fence separating a freight yard from the water. The muddy hinterland is littered with drums, broken palettes, dumped tires and a crippled shopping trolley. Bits of broken glass glint in the dirt.

A black woman is watching him from the doorway of a flat-fronted terrace, one of the few left in the street. This area of London was hit hard during the Blitz and bombed terraces were like broken teeth, filled with something concrete and ugly.

Ruiz wishes her good evening.

“When are they gonna turn off them generators?” she demands.

“I can’t tell you that,” he replies.

“I know what they found. I saw it go in there.”

The woman is in her fifties, with a pink dressing gown cinched tight around her waist. Hair trapped in a net.

“What’s your name, ma’am?”

“Mrs. Abigail Westin.”

“What did you see, Mrs. Westin?”

“I saw them fellas push a car into the river.”

“What did they look like?”

“Pakis or Indians-can’t tell the difference, me.”

“When was this?”

“Early hours. I don’t sleep so good, me. I was in the bathroom. I heard them boys arguing. One of them was saying how it was such a waste, ditching a motor like that. Like he wanted to keep it.”

“How many voices?”

“Two.”

“Would you recognize them again?”

“Their voices maybe. I didn’t get such a good look at their faces.”

Ruiz tells Mrs. Westin that the police will want to interview her and wishes her good night.

“It’ll be a good night when I can sleep till dawn,” she says, switching off the outside light.

Ruiz turns back to the river where the BMW is a broken silhouette against the spotlights, like a sea monster dragged from the depths in a fisherman’s net. A flat-bed truck has arrived to take it away to a police impound. The driver is slinging cables beneath the chassis.

Retracing his steps across the bridge, Ruiz passes on the information to Campbell and asks if he can go now.

“That thing we talked about earlier. Do you think they followed me out here?”